Oracle Bets Big On Cloud With Data Center Buildout

Oracle on Monday showcased an ambitious plan to thrust itself into the leading pack of cloud providers, one entailing a massive buildout of its data center footprint and artificial intelligence powering the automation of services hosted at those facilities.

At Oracle CloudWorld New York, Thomas Kurian, Oracle's president of product development, described Oracle's strategy, involving billions in capital expenditures, to catch up to the cloud leaders by building 12 new data centers around the world. The company will be releasing platform services that leverage machine learning to automate routine operations, security patching and repairs.

The new facilities will be built across Asia, Europe and North America, where two will be in Canada, and two in the United States dedicated for Department of Defense customers.

Just as the 18c database dynamically provisions, patches, updates, and tunes itself, all without human intervention, other Oracle data and analytic platforms will do the same through Oracle Cloud Platform Autonomous Services.

The "self-driving" capabilities will come online this year for transaction processing, NoSQL database, data warehousing and analytics services. They'll leverage machine learning models to help customers reduce their costs and risk, the Oracle leaders said.

Oracle will also deliver AI capabilities to developers who want to infuse intelligence into their applications. Those services will improve code creation, application deployment, and analytics, while enabling self-learning chatbots and self-defining data integrations.

Fourteen of the 24 publicly held channel companies on our watch list saw the price of their stock increase in the first quarter of 2018 while 10 recorded stock price declines. Take a look at who were the winners and who were the losers.

Ingram Micro executive vice president and Americas group president Paul Bay says rather than focus on technology and its delivery, Ingram Micro today is all about the business outcome the channel needs to deliver.